Meanwhile, Google's Chrome browser was also weathering some serious problems – we watched our browser crash six times in the space of an hour. Google, for its part, has listed a "service disruption" for Gmail, and promised to look into the outages.

"We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail," Google reps wrote today. "We will provide more information shortly."

Chrome is back up and running for us, as is Gmail, but Don Reisinger of CNETreports that "Gmail appears to be having some trouble making its way back for some users."

As more and more folks crowd onto platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail – Gmail alone had 425 million regular users as of this summer – outages have become a fact of life: one of the prices we pay for constant, free access.

Twitter, which has been more prone to crashing than other social networks, has responded by increasing the size of its data centers.

It's worth noting that compared with Twitter, Gmail is generally pretty reliable – we run it for several hours each day, and almost never run into any service errors. Which is why we take all those tweets about the world coming to a burning, fiery end with a big old grain of salt.

Hang tight, folks.

And in the meantime, why not follow us on Twitter? Find us @venturenaut.